


Unabashedly Happy

by JulyStorms



Series: Before Colors Broke into Shades [37]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:14:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4147893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi was the sort of person to laugh only if something truly wonderful happened. Hange wondered if the end of their struggle would give him something to laugh about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unabashedly Happy

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "When your voice broke/you stammered during a speech" + Levihan. Requested anonymously on Tumblr.
> 
> This assumes a happy ending.

Levi was the sort of person to laugh only if something truly wonderful happened, something life-changing, something miraculous: like the impossible becoming possible.

So Hange never expected to hear it. A real laugh, of course, not the smirking _hmph_ that slid from his throat when he was pleased with how something turned out.  Pleasure wasn’t enough to elicit laughter from a man like Levi, after all, a man who had never had an excuse to be unabashedly happy about anything.

So when it was over, when they were both standing at the end and there were more people alive than they had dared to hope would be spared, Hange let herself wonder. Maybe this was the miracle that would let Levi laugh.

So when everyone else turned to look at him, crowded around and slung their arms over one another’s shoulders like the emblem on their jacket didn’t matter, she was looking, too.

He made a face, muttered out something that sounded like, “What?”

Historia, looking rather unqueenly in her rumpled, torn uniform, stood up straight. “Captain,” she said, “your queen orders you to say something.” She covered her mouth with a hand, her too-blue eyes squinting in the sunlight and at the delight that seemed to be welling up from inside her.

Levi gaped, swallowed, made a sound of annoyance, but saluted. Everyone followed suit, including Historia, whose face immediately grew grave and serious as if Levi was about to say something important.

“Holy shit,” he choked out, licking his chapped lips, eyes darting from one person to the next until they settled on Hange. Always back to her.

She smiled, softly but with disbelief.

“We—we did it.”

The cheering was so loud and the excitement so contagious that Hange felt sure she was the only one who recognized the hesitation in Levi’s short sentence for what it really was.

“Brats,” he said when he made his way over to her, but the lines in his face seemed lighter somehow.

She tilted her head slightly to one side. “I can’t believe you’re not laughing like the others.”

He stood next to her to watch the others in their celebration, and she followed his line of sight: some Garrison soldiers whose names she didn’t know were carrying each other around on their shoulders, some staggering under the weight of their companions. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Hange and she caught it, offered him a smile.

“You’re not laughing, either,” he said.

She shrugged; Levi knew full well why she wasn’t laughing, why laughter at this particular moment just didn’t seem right somehow. “Still,” she said after a moment, shouldering him gently, “I didn’t think you’d start _crying_.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Not now, but later you will be.” Her hand brushed his cheek. “When you’re alone.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “As if you won’t be doing it, too, probably ruining the pages of a book with all those messy tears of yours.”

“Well, you’re not _wrong_ —“

“Fogging up your glasses…”

“Levi—“

“I can’t believe we did this.” She knew what he wasn’t saying: he couldn’t believe it was real any more than she could, but he felt it was like she did. Felt it and was afraid of it because it had been so long since he’d had a reason to be wholly happy about anything.

“Well, we did,” she said, chest feeling suddenly too heavy. “We have to—we have to let ourselves trust it.”

“Are you going to laugh about it, then?”

“Nah.” She pinched his cheek and when he turned to look at her, blinked to try to keep the moistness from leaving her eyes. She was unsuccessful.

But, she noticed, seeing the wetness at the corner of one of his eyes, hiding in the lines that years of stress had put there, she was not alone.

“I think I’ll just skip straight to the crying, too.”


End file.
